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In this day and age sometimes homes have little or no space to grow even the simplest of crops!
The following information will show that easy to grow things such as herbs and salad crops can be grown in even in the smallest spaces.
Places such as a small border in a small garden, containers of various sizes and growbags.
With a little planning and using a technique called; ‘successional sowing’ it is quite easy to grow salads all year round.
By carefully selecting your cultivars a highly productive display can be achieved from spring until winter
‘Successional sowing’ is basically sowing seed a little at a time and often, as opposed to the larger sowings that are grown in larger gardens.
For instance; sowing a pinch of seed fortnightly can ensure a gradual harvest, rather than a glut of mature crops.
Small hearting and/or cut-and-come-again varieties of lettuce will take 10-12 weeks to mature.
These can be sown indoors in February, followed by outside sowings from March to August, and harvested from April through to October.
Similarly crops of corn salad (lamb's lettuce) endive, rocket, radish leaf, and perpetual spinach can be grown in a similar manner.
Some may even re-grow to give a second a third flush of leaves after cutting.
Cut-and-come-again salads need no thinning; gradually thin out all other varieties, leaving the strongest plant/s to grow on.
You can try various types of onions such as 'bunching' types or spring onions to pull as required.
You can even try ordinary onion cultivars.
With these sow the seed in short rows or patches and don't thin them out as you would if growing them to their potential.
Eventually they will bulb up to be eaten as normal cooking onions or salad onions, or for that matter pickle them.
The key to success in each case is; successive sowings to ensure that crops are available for cutting after the first sowings are finished.
For winter salads, grow hardy plants such as spinach, corn salad, rocket, hardy lettuce and land cress.
Mustard, curled cress and bean sprouts on moist kitchen towel or in food containers with a little vermiculite in the bottom.
Basically choice of subjects is only limited to what the individual is prepared to experiment with e.g. herbs!
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